Aleksandra Mir

Aleksandra Mir

Camera Austria, Graz, Nov 2004
By Kirsty Bell

In summer 2004, Aleksandra Mir took part in 'Localismos' a
residency programm which brought twenty artists (Mexican and
foreigners) together to work in the dilapidated historical heart of
Mexico City. The organizers, Perros Negros, set up the workshop as
a means for artists to engage directly with the materials and
craftsmanship of this local area and create works specific to the
context as a means of examining globalization 'not as an isolated
phenomena, but as a union of localities.'1

Although based in New York City since 1989, Mir, like many artists
of her generation, has lately lead a largely peripatetic existence
due to the proliferation of international exhibitions and
residencies now taking place in all parts of the world. Over the
past four years she has lived in London, San Francisco, Sydney and
Zurich, as well as Mexico City. For Mir, who has no studio practice
as such and works largely on a project to project basis in whatever
medium best suits the idea, the issue in these situations is how to
produce work that can respond to the unique context without
conveying a 'preconceived message'. Her approach can be seen in the
light of her academic background in anthropology; with its colonial
background, itself a problematic subject that was undergoing a
fundamental reevaluation while Mir was a student: 'everyone seemed
nervous about what they were doing, trying to figure out the new
ethical approach to their subjects ... [the anthropologists] were
definitely justifying their practices with very personal reasoning,
passion and they were also experimenting with form.'2 Both
impassioned reasoning and experimental form are central aspects
within Mir's artistic output: an incredibly prolific, varied and
personal body of work, all of which she document and explains in
great detail on her own website (www.aleksandramir.info). She sets
herself in a precarious and contradictory position, attempting at
once to engage directly with a community, while representing it to
a wider audience as the subject of an artwork in an unpatronising
and non-didactic manner.

In the case of her residency in Mexico City, Mir found a
performative solution to the problem, deciding to dedicate her
month-long stay to taking part in Latin dance classes in order to
'simply use my body language to engage with local people and
customs'3, while also attending performances of traditional dance
to enrich her knowledge of local cultural tradition. The result was
the documentary video Organized Movement—a video
diary (2004) designed 'to tell my story of centro
historico and Mexico City'. It is a sprawling home-made video diary
that covers everything from Mir's attendance at the dance classes
and performances, to observations of ubiquitous teen culture,
scenes in seedy-looking night clubs and techno festivals, and
moments of spontaneous dancing with fellow resident-artists in
offices, hotel lobbies or private apartments, backed with a
soundtrack of infectious Mexican pop songs. Mir's narrative
voice-over adopts the model of old television documentaries for
children: a patronizing tone full of sweeping judgments and lofty
assessments (whose authority is reinforced by translated German
subtitles), which jars with the video's casual, unsophisticated and
often banal images. She exploits this discrepancy in moments such
as where the narrator's promise of an investigation of 'local
customs' cutting straight to a scene of trendy teenage boys playing
high-tech games in a video arcade, who could just as well be in
London or Tokyo as Mexico City. The documentary is characterized by
a light-heartedness and casual quality that sets it apart from the
rash of artist-made documentaries examining the quandaries of
globalization to be found in many recent large-scale international
group shows. Just as in Mir's ongoing photo project 'Hello' (a
never-ending daisy chain of snapshots that knits together
international celebrities with ordinary people while leaping across
generations, cultures and continents), we experience a collapsing
of scale where the familiar and the exotic, the local and the
global fold together into a celebration of uncircumscribed
individuality and human nature: 'I literally go to the opposite end
of the world, to the most exotic faraway places I possibly can,
only to find the closest things to me when I get there ... I keep
coming back to the obvious points again and again.'4 Perhaps it is
this willingness to appreciate the familiar within the unknown that
allows Mir to occupy her straddling position as both interloper and
confidant.

What is clear from Mir's video diary is the central role that
building new relationships plays in her experience of Mexico City.
Although ostensibly documenting her engagement with local culture,
what we are presented with is a kind of 'Day in the Life of an
Artist in Residence', with as much behind the scenes tom-foolery as
evidence of external fieldwork. The video diary format, as popular
with fly-on-the-wall journalists as MTV music celebrities, is
uniquely suited to weaving political facts, celebrity propaganda or
cultural analysis together with the most quotidian of activities.
Mir's video diary does not produce any profound revelations,
although it does throw in speculations on the nature of
globalization, revolution and urbanization amongst plenty of
footage of bad dancing, drunken group singing, miscellaneous banter
and hanging around. It is not an expose or critique of the practice
of artists in residence, in contrast to, say, Maurizio Cattelan's
'6th Caribbean Biennale' (1999), where Cattelan invited a group of
artist friends to a Caribbean island for what can only be described
as a holiday. Whereas Cattelan exploits the proliferation of
biennale exhibitions and questions their purpose in relation to the
artists, while incidentally providing an opportunity for artistic
discussion, for Mir the focus is the community itself and the often
collaborative nature of artistic practice.

Inclusiveness is a recurrent feature of Mir's work and
Organized Movement is itself as much about group
dynamics as individual encounters. Mir's readiness to present
herself uncompromisingly in positions of humiliation or plain
silliness does much to dispel notions of artistic ego and places
her shoulder to shoulder with her contemporaries. Mir finds the
dance classes difficult and humiliating ('Being new in a class and
not fitting in must count as one of the most common human
experiences of alienation') but any tension is tempered by comic
shots of her stumbling or tripping as well as numerous relaxed,
impromptu dance numbers performed by herself and her friends on
street corners. As Mir explains in the voice-over 'Taking community
as a starting point for spontaneous movement ... where everyone is
a welcome interpreter and contributor, the best thing happens, new
dances are born.' These chaotic dance routines together with
countless examples of bad lighting, lack of focus and camera-shake
make this an exercise in the unspectacular rather than the glossy
power of the moving image. But professionalism is not a condition
towards which Mir aspires. Her openness to amateur performance is
apparent in her involvement since 1999 with 'M.I.M.E.', described
as 'a collective effort to revitalize the art form of Mime', of
which she was a founding member. A collaborative spoof together
with artist-performers Gavin Russom, Delia Gonzalez, Chris Holstad
and Sigrun Hrolfsdottir, 'M.I.M.E.' involved much a lot of
monochromatic fancy-dress and face-paint, accessorized with French
baguettes and berets, and stated its manifesto as such: 'We never
set down any rules for M.I.M.E. but get together when we feel like
being mimes and do what we think a mime might want to do at any
given moment and situation.' Their public appearances in Times
Square, a New York supermarket, public parks and even swimming
pools owe more to Marcel Marceau and 'performance in society', than
a tradition of performance art, although Bruce McLean's 'Nice
Style: the world's first pose band' from the early 1970s, in which
a tuxedoed quartet acted out the gestural trappings of the British
class system and its attendant bureaucracy, does spring to mind.
Elaborately gestural and clearly ridiculous, 'M.I.M.E.'s' impromptu
actions inserted into everyday situations are a low budget street
theater designed to defy the conventions of cosmopolitan behavior:
'it is great freedom to be M.I.M.E.'

Mir's attraction to performance seems to be down to its directness
and accessibility as a means of expression. Her contribution to the
High Desert Test Sites Spring Event held in Joshua Tree in 2003 was
titled 'I am a Joshua Tree' and involved Mir standing on a rock in
the desert, arms and legs crooked in performative approximations of
a Joshua Tree. Another attempt through body language to assimilate
with her surroundings, perhaps. As with 'M.I.M.E.', this displays a
willingness to throw off inhibitions, presenting herself as a
laughably amateur performer to break down the distance between
herself and her audience.

In Organized Movement, Mir is not only performer, however,
but also off-camera director, issuing instructions to the people
she is filming: 'Dance like a horse!', 'Can you whistle!', 'Say
"localismos"!'. In an effort to instill organization into people's
random movements, she directs first a group of models, and later a
group of friends, to cross their legs a certain way, put their arms
around each other and sway in time with each other (it's called
'synchronized movement'). 'Everything that is alive moves, but not
all movement is organized,' she declares in the video's narration
and sets out to determine how organization of movement happens.
Images of karaoke, group-dancing and political protest appear as
examples. Her own attempts at synchronization may be 'organized
movement' at the most basic level, but the implication here is that
even such lowly beginnings can improve things at least on a
superficial level, while possibly bringing about change or adding
up to a more powerful means of expression. The potential for
political protest or revolutionary movement (as well as new dance
crazes) is quietly suggested.

Many of Mir's larger projects are built on the idea of organized
movement, taking the form of collaborative operations that are
ultimately as much about the activity of bringing diverse groups
together with a common goal as the final result itself. Lars Bang
Larsen described them as 'social processes that are open for anyone
who wishes to give the work meaning.'5 The 1999 project First
Woman on the Moon is a case in point. With only a
shoe-string budget to work with, Mir convinced fifty volunteers, a
steel factory and two municipalities to help her turn an empty
stretch of Dutch coastline into a lunar landscape to stage the
landing of the first female astronauts several of the girls working
on the production dressed up in space age outfits), greeted by a
bank of television cameras who had been invited to come and record
this faux-historic event. Later that afternoon the moonscape was
razed and the beach returned to its usual state. The huge
motivating effort involved was short-lived but effective, as the
wide spread media coverage showed. In such situations, Mir acts as
the catalyst, motivating the diverse groups with an infectious
enthusiasm that underlines the seriousness with which she
undertakes these ambitious projects. The fact that no one believed
that her recent project, Plane Landing, would be possible
did not deter her from persevering until it was realized. Mir had
the idea of building a life-size model of a passenger plane, in the
form of a helium balloon, that could be inserted into various
different landscapes (the Swiss Alps, the Manhattan skyline, the
California desert) as her 'contribution to the landscape tradition
in art.'6 Not only an extraordinary sculptural object, the plane is
also a symbol of modern technology and the shrinking world as well
as of accidents, tragedy and terrorism.

While on the one hand Mir encourages coordination and consensus to
develop from a small scale individual impetus, on the other hand,
much of her work contains an implicit criticism of authority. When
asked to participate in this year's Whitney Biennial, she decided
to hang sixteen small generic No Smoking signs on the
gallery walls amongst the other exhibited works. This piece
commented particularly on the situation in Mir's home town of New
York where, over the past few years, increasingly restrictive civic
legislation has been gradually introduced, culminating in a total
ban on smoking in public places and bringing with it an erosion of
simple individual freedoms. 'It reflects on authority, and
acceptance of authority as it is manifested in New York City, the
US and all over the world by our generation right now.'7 Of course
no one is likely to light up a cigarette in the Whitney Museum, but
despite this, many visitors did not notice the signs; an indication
of how used we are to being told what to do and what not to do. The
piece was taken to its logically absurd conclusion by collector
Andy Stillpass who bought it and installed the No Smoking
sign on the bottom of his swimming pool. This in turn lead to
another long term performative project in which Mir has undertaken
to declare each of the world's seas a No Smoking zone. The
first ceremony occurred late this summer during another residency,
this time on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Speeches were
given and Mir, dressed in a long flowing white dress, waded into
the water as if in a 19th century colonial baptism, announcing 'I
hereby declare the Atlantic Ocean a No Smoking Territory!'
Home-made spectacle, humor and fun overlay a critique of not only
the authoritarian restriction of personal freedom but also the
disintegration of common sense in politics, a situation already
approaching crisis point in the current American administration.

Mir's criticism tends to assume a light-hearted diversionary tone,
however, not addressing the subject directly or bombastically but
channeling her energy into more creatively rewarding alternatives.
With Daily News, a self-published tabloid newspaper
brought out on September 11th 2002, the first anniversary of the
attacks on the World Trade Center and also Mir's 35th birthday, she
wanted to 'reclaim my birthday from the fascism of 9-11
memorialisation' and the 'September 11th industry'8 by providing
her own newspaper with an open editorial policy and contents
provided by her friends and colleagues. The result, printed on a
professional newspaper press the night before, has the authentic
quality of a tabloid paper but the front page headline screams
'HAPPY BIRTHDAY!' and its contents are personalized and
idiosyncratic with tributes to Aleksandra and critiques on the
post-September 11th political situation as well as drawings,
photographs, advertisements, interviews, texts and classified ads
all submitted by artists and friends. While functioning as both
political protest and personal celebration, it works also as an
open space for all forms of creativity. Again Mir exploits the rift
between professional and amateur, combining a recognizable format
and professional means of production with an unedited content.
Similarly, when it came to editing her video diary from Mexico
City, Mir engaged a professional editing company to produce a
slickly cut version full of tricky split screens, speed changes and
fade outs, at odds with the decidedly low-budget footage. Highly
pro-active and socially aware, Mir is ready to take advantage of
whatever resources are available, be it collaboration with other
artists, industrial help-in-kind, technical special effects or
media spin, to increase the volume, scale and scope of her
ambitious and prolific projects.